A quick site on the Evelix today yielded plenty of salmon parr and even a couple of these characters! Good escape artists, it takes a while for them to calm down in the anaesthetic. They may make some people squirm, but the lifecycle of these creatures is incredible. Nobody has seen eels spawning in the wild, but it is suspected that they do so somewhere in the Sargasso sea on the other side of the Atlantic. The young, “glass eels” then get caught in the gulf stream which brings them to UK waters where they become adults, before finally swimming back across the Atlantic to spawn.

Sean Robertson – Science & Mitigation Officer